Continuity of Care
by hasserbine
Summary: Lauren checks in on an old patient. Set during S2. This story has been previously posted elsewhere.


This is a repost of a fic which has been previously posted elsewhere.

Lauren Checks in on a patient. Set during S2.  
Some grown-up language.  
Feedback appreciated.

**Disclaimer: This show and these characters are not my toys.**

"It's been a while" she says plainly.

She has to start somewhere, and Lauren has always preferred to start with facts.

She leaves a file folder down on the little bedside table, beside a thin plastic cup of water, and drags a chair to The Ash's bedside. She knows his real name, of course, but he has always been The Ash in her mind, and he is still The Ash to her.

The last time she was here, the frequent repetition of this dragging action had scuffed unsightly lines into the glossy floor. This time, she notes with equal interest that the scuffing has gotten scarcely worse in her long absence. All that footfall, she suspects, has started finding its way to Lachlan's office.

"I should have come more often, really. The research suggests that there's a slightly higher chance of response if communication is positive and persistent."

She goes on to recite the statistics and percentages and study outcomes as she pulls off her jacket and takes a seat, barely aware she's even speaking aloud. She does not bother going on to tell him about muscle atrophy in persistently vegetative patients, although she knows all about it, because she knows quite well that the Fae have already solved that problem.

She knows too, that the Fae have kept that solution to themselves. They have kept it from thousands of suffering patients and thousands of suffering families; patients like Nadia, and people like _her_. People who didn't expect it, or invite it, or deserve it. She knows this quite intimately, because she has been complicit in it. It is one of the many terrible compromises she has learned to live under, and not the most terrible by any measure.

"- but I guess you don't really need to know any of that" she finishes, loosing an abrupt laugh. It makes for a strange and unwelcome sound against the hard, clinical surfaces of this hard, clinical room.

"Still, I guess it would be reassuring to see how familiar I've become with the condition. Of all the doctors, in all the world, you had to end up with this one, right? That strikes me as an irony you'd really appreciate."

She can say this with confidence. Not many people in the world could claim to be as attuned to The Ash's sense of humour as Lauren. In truth, few would even suggest he even had one, but Lauren had long since learned to navigate the nuance of his tempers, fair and foul.

"I've been thinking, actually, that you probably found my whole situation pretty funny too. Win yourself a trophy scientist by outsmarting her, that's your taste in irony to a T, I seem to recall."

She shifts uncomfortably in the cheap plastic chair. It's an ugly chair in an ugly room – luxury is not wasted on the patients housed in _this_ part of the medical complex.

"I've wondered if you laughed about it. God, when I think about all the times all the times I asked you for help, all the times I ran to you to tell you all about my… _progress_..."

She laughs again, and doesn't even bother trying to soften the bitter ring in it.

"All those times, I came to you with everything, because I had nobody else. And you _let_ me! You let me stand there like a child with a new party trick, telling you all about the new experiment outline or scientific breakthrough, or God help me,_ miracle cure_ I'd heard about. Knowing better all along, knowing that you'd already been smarter than me. You must have loved it, alright."

Her hands are restless, ready to tremble, and if she had her labcoat, she'd have buried them in the pockets already to hide it. She jams her palms to her knees to steady them instead.

"And I guess you even bragged about it, too. To the Morrigan at least, she certainly knew all about it. Should I be flattered about that? That you thought it would impress The Morrigan? That's something, I suppose right?"

She doesn't laugh now, although she almost wants to. She wants to laugh and cry and scream all at once. But she has wanted to do those things many times over the last five years, and she has spent that time learning to swallow every one of those impulses right down. She has learned to marshal and master all of her inward and outward impulses, lest she betray her humanity, her weakness, to anyone who could use it against her.

Still, she's surprised at how easily the next words come to her, although, again, she speaks only the facts.

"I loved you, in a way."

The words themselves seem foreign to this place, but it is the truth.

"Not like a lover or brother or father obviously, but… I loved you. Stockholm Syndrome maybe, now that I think about it. Probably doesn't matter now. I think you must have known it too, I mean you didn't _need_ to listen to everything I told you. I was just dependant on you, I didn't have anybody else. Just Nadia, and you. And I was so grateful, for what you'd done for us, for what you'd offered us. You were all I had in the world, and I would have done almost_ anything_ for you, and God damn you for knowing that too."

A different woman might have let a tremble into her voice by now, but Lauren Lewis will not. She permits herself to take a hard breath before continuing, and that will be her only concession.

"I didn't do _that _though. I didn't do _that_ for _you_. I don't care if you believed it, and God, I hate that Bo believes it, but _I _know. I'll always know that, and you couldn't take that away from me."

When she realises she's leaning forward, she sits back to collect herself. She is losing her temper, and she cannot bear to do that now.

Silence settles, and she spends a few minutes examining her hands intently.

Lately, when her hands idly run her fingers against each other, she finds herself imagining the heat of a woman's body beneath them. She smiles sadly to herself that such fancies come so habitually now; unbidden, disobedient diversions that won't stay buried. She had not missed these guilty impulses, but they seem to have resurfaced in force in recent months and she has little doubt about the reason why.

She can't smell the faint signature of the harsh clinical handwash here in this harsh clinical room, but she can still feel the powder residue of latex exam gloves, and, just as surely, she can feel the familiar trace of shame that the body she imagines is Bo.

With a weary sigh, she dismisses the image, and with a considerable effort, recovers her train of thought.

""The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.", have you heard that one?"

She is quite sure he has, although of course he doesn't answer.

"It's not actually the clinical definition, for the record. The first… two years, I guess, they were the hardest. Every day I'd expect to see her wake up, and every night, I'd have to accept all over again that she hadn't. You can't live like that forever, you can't keep hoping the same way every day or… or your heart just keeps breaking. It just breaks every day."

This is another simple, stony fact, and she states it without emotion.

"You go numb after a while, you have to. It's a kind of clinical amputation, a sacrifice to save the whole. You have to give up hope,_ real_ hope, or it just… rots you out, eats you up. After that, it got easier. Bit by bit, I got a little bit more numb. A little bit further from her, and a little bit closer to you. I don't remember when it started to happen, but I don't know, maybe you do. You probably had Nadia's room bugged, maybe you heard it in me."

She pauses thoughtfully for a moment, something occurring to her for the first time.

"I suppose that could be why you trusted me with so much, really. I know it was unusual for a pet human, even one of yours. I was proud of it, but I guess maybe you just knew exactly when I was good as broken."

It makes sense. Strange it hadn't dawned on her before, really.

"Sometimes I wonder, you know... oh, it's silly. I wonder if you_ wanted _me to ruin what was happening with Bo. I met her, and it was like I woke up all of a sudden. Like_ I_ woke up, there's another irony for you. And I wonder if that worried you, that maybe I might not be totally dependent on you anymore. I mean, once I couldn't have imagined that the almighty Ash would have been so cruel or so petty as to do something like that, but now... well, now I wonder."

She shrugs.

"But, I guess that's beside the point now. I'm sorry, it's very easy to lose your line of thought in this kind of conversation. It's important to keep talking to patients in your condition, but it can get very stream-of-consciousness without any reply. You'd think I'd have it down to a fine art, given how much time I've had to practise, right?"

"That's a learning curve too. The first week, she could have woken up any minute. You know, it wasn't technically classified a coma yet, she was just "unconscious". And then the second week came and went, and it was real. Less than fifty percent of coma patients ever make some kind of recovery. Less than ten percent make a full one. And after one month, the percentages drop off a cliff, and keep dropping. The longer they're gone, the less of them comes back, too. Did you know that?"

And even now, she very nearly leaves him time to reply before proceeding.

"I sure did. I knew it every day. I could almost feel the numbers counting down. Four years is the generally accepted cutoff point, that's when you know. The percentage chance then is in single digits. Somebody gone for four years isn't going to come back."

She could reel these things off as easily as her own full name or phone number. Facts, and facts, and facts. They made for a pitiless kind of solace, but she had no other kind at her disposal.

"When we crossed that point, Nadia and I, I thought it was going to tear me apart, but it didn't. Because deep down I'd already started to accept it; she'd been gone for almost as long as we'd been together. I'd already started to let _my_ Nadia go, and the one who might come back was somebody else. She wouldn't be_ my Nadia_, she'd be… my patient. My patient Nadia. I was used to taking care of her every day, and that's what I'd always do. I was used to talking to her, and not getting an answer. "

The doctor pauses again for a few moments, but in the bland room, the marching of the clock is audible and it draws her eye. She has already taken far longer than she expected, and she is anxious to say what she must. She takes a deep breath and lets it out again.

"The truth is, when I talk to Nadia, I hope she doesn't hear me. I hope she doesn't hear anything. I hope she doesn't _feel_ anything. I hope she's somewhere else, so she can't feel the time pass."

She leans closer, and for this, she wishes dearly that she could look him in the eye this one last time.

"And I hope it's different for you."

"You, I hope you feel it. I hope you hear every word. I hope you feel every damn second slip away, I hope you can feel yourself getting left behind. I hope you feel yourself die out of the world a little more with every single moment that passes you by. I hope you feel yourself sink, and fall, and lose, over and over again, all the time, every day. Like I had to. For _five years_. For what you did to us."

She stands up and starts to shrug her jacket back on.

"I don't want you to think I hate you. You just don't matter enough any more for that. You've stolen five years from Nadia, five years from me, and once she wakes up you're not getting another second. I've got to go now, Bo's waiting. And when I walk out that door, I'm going to walk back into my life, and you're not any part of that anymore."

She gathers her binder together, and turns to leave..

"And someday, maybe I'll walk out of this compound for the last time. And maybe you_ never _will. And_ maybe,_maybe I'll start to feel something about that eventually, but that... that's going to take a while."

Lauren takes one last look at him before she goes, simply for the sake of it. He looks, of course, exactly the same as he did when she arrived; exactly the same as he did when she met him, exactly the same as the last time she was here, and exactly the same as he might look for centuries to come.

As she walks through the door she recalls, with a quite unbecoming satisfaction, the very, very audible tick of the clock on the wall.

By the time she gets back to the car, a sulking Kenzi has been relegated to the backseat. Bo bolts upright as soon as she sees her approach, trying not to look like she'd been bored.

"You get what you needed?" she asks, nodding to the folder.

"Yeah" says Lauren flatly, buckling her alarmingly frayed seatbelt and clutching the randomly chosen files as though they were terribly vital. "Sorry it took so long."

Bo almost knows for sure that the doctor is keeping something from her; either by lies or omission. But just this once, she knows better than to ask.

Lauren, of course, says nothing.

* * *

Deep in the medical complex, in the rooms where the walls aren't painted very often, and the chairs are cheap and ugly and seldom used, the monitors keeping watch on the former Ash fall out of rhythm.

The subtle muscles of his face tense just a little, and betray, for only a moment, the faintest hint of a battle being fought and lost. The flicker of electronic activity ceases just as abruptly as it began, and the man's strong features relax just as quickly.

The machines resume their steady step, and everything is once again as it has been, for weeks and weeks and weeks now.

There is no one to notice.


End file.
